Some things that have crossed my wires (in all senses) recently, that I’m keeping track of:

Theory is a force that gives us meaning. A very good post which makes a point similar to that of the revered J.Z. Smith: in order for theory to be truly useful, it must be at least temporarily granted the opportunity to direct and determine portions of our reasoning. Or else it’s largely just academic window dressing. My students will be reading this next Spring.

Highlight the connections between people! A call for doing anthropology differently, along the lines of what I think as the Deleuzian dictum: “Relativism is not the the relativity of truth, but the truth of relation.”

Boa Sr, the last speaker of the Bo language, and the last member of the Bo group of the Andaman Islands of India, has passed. Her passing was noted by many news organizations, from New Mandala, Gáldu (Resource Center for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples), , and the Asian Sentinel, which reprinted this picture from the article published by Survival International.

The normal way of imagining relationships with ancestors in Cambodia is that they demand our offerings of food and merit, and in return, they endow the earth with fertility, wealth, and blessings, making our own paltry lives possible.

Every once in awhile this takes a somewhat different spin than you’d imagine, as with these villagers in Kampot province. Apparently while excavating a Khmer Rouge era gravesite, they came upon a more ancient burial ground, and they liberated a fair bit of valuable jewelry as a result. Whatever we think about the looting (and I hate it, but don’t judge the looters themselves as much as the people who drive the trade through consumption or organization), these villagers then organized a ceremony, replete with Buddhist monks, to give thanks to the dead for their gifts.

UPDATE: It is now clear that the grave in question was not an ancient site, but a mass burial ground from the DK period. There’s a decent article by Seth Mydans in today’s International Herald Tribune, here.

An absolutely lovely essay on Marcel Mauss and the stages of anthropological reception of his essay on the gift can be found on Keith Hart’s page, called The Memory Bank. It’s important for a host of reasons, most importantly that it attempts to provide a corrective to both the economizing and romanticizing takes on that essay which have dominated its reception, and that it does this by tying its concerns into Mauss’ own concerns for political action and a humane economics.

Here’s a good quote:

The “fictions” employed ingeniously by Marilyn Strathern in The Gender of the Gift – that “we” (the West or “Euroamerica”) are opposed to “them” (the Rest or “Melanesia”) and that the gift is the conceptual opposite of the commodity in some linked way — are now routinely reproduced in introductory anthropology courses everywhere. Mauss’s text is adduced in support of this notion, even though it is the very ideology his essay was intended to refute. But then who reads anything closely these days?

The French literature is, for obvious reasons, much more respectful of Mauss’s actual rather than his invented legacy (Godbout and Caillé 2000, Godelier 1999). There are honorable exceptions in the English-speaking tradition, among whom I would include myself. Jonathan Parry’s article also argues correctly that the purely altruistic gift was for Mauss the inverse of the market conceived of as a sphere of pure self-interest, whereas the archaic gift was a mixture of the two; so that market ideology leads us to think of Christmas presents as pure gifts, an idea that we then project onto our reading of Mauss’s text. But chief among the exceptions must be counted David Graeber who offers a full-length reanalysis of The Gift, complete with detailed attribution of Mauss’s socialist views and acknowledgment of the continuation of his intellectual politics by the MAUSS group, among others. It will be interesting to see if this long chapter makes any difference to the wholesale adoption of bourgeois ideology by Anglophone anthropologists who affect disaffection from it, while imagining that Mauss was as opposed to the market as they claim to be, at least in their classrooms.

Of course, I’ve written on the gift in previous posts, and it serves as my core concern in chapter three of my dissertation. I have been guided in my own approach to the gift by Graeber’s approach (in his excellent Toward an anthropological theory of value), but insofar as I have tendencies towards one pole or the other, it must be admitted that I tend towards the romantic anti-economizing pole. I’m comfortable with that: I do not believe that there are such things are ‘pure gift economies’ in which personal interest is not instituted or motivational, but neither do I believe that our own capitalist society is one in which all altruism has been squashed. Rather, both are tendencies which are instituted to lesser and greater degrees in various socio-historical moments and places. But if you want to see an essay of mine (again, the kernel of chapter three of my dissertation, currently being written) which puts these two tendencies in a tension that could be justifiably criticized as somewhat romantic, you can click here.

Here’s a link to a short (but sweet) article by David Graeber on Mauss, the gift, and M.A.U.S.S. (which is not a secret society from Inspector Gadget, but a group of radical economists in France). Give It Away.

Just a re-posting of a piece from Cambodge Soir, on the payment of ‘compensation’ to widows of Khmer Rouge victims from a Japanese businessman who urges ‘forgiveness.’ In this case, the local village chief is taking his ‘cut.’ Posted from here. Read the rest of this entry »

Lots of reading this week: The new Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, almost completely on Cambodia; David Graeber’s big book on anthropological value, Thom Hartmann’s atrocious but well-intentioned eco-nightmare, and Alfie Kohn’s lovely caution against bribing your kids.

One of Deleuze and Guattari’s favorite techniques is to turn conceive of something that is the sum of its parts that are not usually thought together. (See, especially, Deleuze, Gilles, and Fâelix Guattari. Anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990 [1983].)

So, we get words like ‘heterogenous assemblages,’ which attempts to point out the connectedness that exists between two different entities. The important thing for D&G is to understand that in these cases, the connection is made possible by the difference between the two: the difference makes the difference.

I received a wonderful response to my recent Pretas paper from a friend, which inspired me to write this response. I’m posting it here because these thoughts need to go into the reworking of this paper into an early chapter on death and giving, and also because it allowed me to state some preliminary thoughts on what I mean by Deathpower, which is, after all, the name of this blog. Here it is:

Oh my. That’s quite a list. I’ll attempt to be brief, relative to the works themselves, but this will be one of the longer posts I’ve written so far. On the other hand, it also promises, I hope, to be one of the more focused and interested. I want here to identify some of the key points of the idea of the Gift as I have received them and as I will use them in my work.

Mauss

In his classic essay The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, Mauss attacked the long-held notion that among so-called primitive peoples, gift-giving was a clandestine form of rational economic exchange. This was a thunderbolt of an argument, the full ramifications of which are barely absorbed, even in anthropology. Essentially, Mauss was arguing that White people have been assuming, on the basis of their own economic forms of barter and currency-exchange, that this was primary. Instead, Mauss argues that gift-giving was instead the primary form of exchange, of which barter and currency-exchange are secondary distortions which deny the collective good guaranteed by gift economies (cf. general reciprocity). Read the rest of this entry »